Shalva Dadiani's The Yesterday’s People: the Theatrical Version of the Play in the Period of Developed Socialism

Abstract

Shalva Dadiani's play The Yesterday’s People was written in 1917, long before the establishment of the Socialist Realism method and the Soviet Union itself. In the 1930s, Georgian literary critics put the writer's early works in the Soviet ideological context and compared them to the works of Maxim Gorky, the founder of Socialist Realism.

In 1972, by that time already well-known theatre director Temur Chkheidze staged The Yesterday’s People in Rustaveli Theater. We discuss the main messages of the theatre director, communicated through the play by Shalva Dadiani, and their consistency with the playwright's concept.